The 2018 Grammys: A Deep Dive Into Viewer Behavior

Sunday’s 60th Annual Grammy Awards on CBS was just the latest installment of the current awards-season bonanza. TVRev partnered with Inscape, the TV measurement company with glass-level data from a panel of more than 7.7 smart TVs and device, to reveal viewership trends during the evening, including what people watched before, during and after the broadcast as well as what people watched instead of the Grammys. Although overall ratings were down this year compared to last, when it came to what people watched live during the night, the Grammys blew everything else out of the water:  When looking at the physical locations people watched from, it’s interesting to see that viewership has increased in New York in particular as well as up and down the East Coast; conversely, fewer were watching in California than last year. (On the heatmaps below, the darker the color, the more people were likely to be watching, with the baseline normalized by each state’s population.)Unsurprisingly, the program people were most likely to watch before the Grammys was the Grammys Red Carpet Live, followed by America’s Funniest Home Videos and Dateline NBC. During the awards, some of the shows people were tuning away for included Shark Tank, the PGA Tour Golf and NBA Basketball. And for those who eschewed the Grammys altogether, America’s Funniest Home Videos, Dateline NBC and Shark Tank topped the list. Those three series also led in what viewers consumed after the awards were over.According to Canvs, the emotion measurement company, there were a total of 1,191,452 Emotional Reactions (ERs) to the broadcast during the evening with love reigning supreme (28.1%), followed by enjoy (9.5%), congrats (9.3%) and funny (8.2%)When it came to the celebrities driving the most conversation, Cardi, Childish Gambino (aka Donald Glover) and Kesha were at the top of the list.